Today at VMworld the new version of Virtual SAN, version 6.1, was introduced. VMware’sVirtual SAN leverages local storage in servers and delivers it to the vSphere cluster as a virtual SAN. vSAN was introduced in 2014 as version 5.5. The new features are pretty impressive. Initially Virtual SAN required to have at least 1 SSD and 2 SAS or SATA disks per node with a minimum of 3 nodes. With the new version you have more options and better protection.

Virtual SAN basically comes in 2 flavors:Virtual SAN Standard andVirtual SAN Advanced. With vSAN standard you have these features:

NVMe (Non Volatile Memory, Express) is a communications protocol developed developed to overcome the SAS/SATA bus limitations, specifically for SSDs, allowing for greater parallelism to be utilized by both hardware and software and as a result various performance improvements. Leveraging NVMe in a Virtual SAN all flash deployment resulted in 3.2M IOPS measured on a 32-node cluster at about 100.000 IOPS per Host.

Ultra DIMM SSDs connect flash storage to the memory channel via DIMM slots, achieving very low (<5us) write latency. Ultra DIMM provides even greater density and performance. For example, it allows for a 12-TB All Flash Virtual SAN host in a thin blade form factor, as well as 3x improvement in latency compared to external arrays. For those of you who don’t know Diablo Ultra DIMM, check out our article from VMworld 2014 on this innovative technology

Upgrade Path

If you already have vSAN 6, how can you upgrade to v6.1? There are a few upgrade paths.

Alex Muetstege

Alex Muetstege works as a Technical Account Manager for VMware. In the past he worked presales and technical consultancy for several systems integrators. He has been involved in virtualization, especially with VMware, since the early days.Alex is a certified VMware VCP, VSP and VTSP.6 times VMware vExpert (2011-2018) and one time Cisco Champion (2015).